Jimmie Fadden
Jimmie Fadden is a harmonica player, drummer and singer who co-founded the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Jeff Hanna in Long Beach, California, in 1966 and played in every lineup of the band for the next sixty years. His harmonica runs through all three Will the Circle Be Unbroken albums.
Fadden grew up in Long Beach, where he and Hanna were among the young players who gathered at McCabe’s Guitar Shop and formed a jug band. In the first lineup, with Hanna, Bruce Kunkel, Ralph Barr, Les Thompson and Jackson Browne, he played washtub bass, harmonica and guitar, and in the late 1960s he was still playing guitar, harmonica, washtub bass and jug. He recalled being nineteen when the band’s first single, “Buy for Me the Rain,” was played on Los Angeles radio.
On Will the Circle Be Unbroken, recorded in Nashville in August 1971 and issued by United Artists in 1972, Fadden played harmonica on most of the tracks, behind Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Merle Travis and Jimmy Martin, including the title song, Martin’s “My Walkin’ Shoes” and Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon.” He played autoharp on the Carter Family’s “You Are My Flower” and sang lead on Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonkin’.”
Through the 1970s the band’s lineups listed him on drums, guitar, harmonica and vocals, and from the early 1980s, when Jimmy Ibbotson rejoined and the band turned to country music, he took over the drums as well as harmonica and singing. He wrote “Workin’ Man (Nowhere to Go),” a top-ten country single from Workin’ Band (1988). He played on Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two (1989), the Country Music Association’s Album of the Year and a Grammy winner, and on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume III (Capitol, 2002), where he again played harmonica behind most of the guests, among them Doc Watson, Del McCoury, Jimmy Martin, Johnny Cash and Vince Gill, playing alongside Mickey Raphael on the tracks with Willie Nelson, and added snare and kick drum on the track with Alison Krauss.
After John McEuen left in 2017, Fadden, Hanna and Bob Carpenter were the band’s core, joined in 2018 by Jaime Hanna, Ross Holmes and Jim Photoglo. Away from the band he played in a trio around Sarasota, Florida, where he lives. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band began a farewell tour in January 2024 and, as of July 2026, had played its last shows as a touring act in June 2026.
